The internet is going to spoil my appreciation of reality based movies.

Chariots of Fire is a favorite of mine. Many were surprised when it won the Best Picture Oscar, but it was the best movie I saw that year (yes, better than Raiders of the Lost Ark).

I love the opening words:

Let us praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. All these men were honoured in their generations and were a glory in their days. We are here today to give thanks for the life of Harold Abrahams. To honour the legend. Now there are just two of us - young Aubrey Montague and myself - who can close our eyes and remember those few young men with hope in our hearts and wings on our heels.

And the transition to the score of Vangelis.

I can grudgingly accept the transfer of Aubrey Montague from Oxford to Cambridge (and thus from college rival to teammate) to support the use of Montague’s historical letters to his mother to bridge between scenes.

But it gave me pause to read on Wikipedia that Abrahams converted to Catholicism (since removed). It might be true. Or it might be false. But the doubt in my mind is not going away anytime soon.

I was better off not knowing doubting.

My head says Spain 1-0, but my heart says Netherlands 2-1.

I was stress testing an application with JMeter when I discovered that the bottleneck was in the application setup rather than the actual application logic. My first reaction was to use a ramp to spread each thread’s application setup over time with a throughput controller as a starting gate once all the threads had been properly initialized. But the throughput controller wasn’t working for me, so I tried a BeanShell Timer instead.

My plan was to use a variable length delay for each delay. If the application setup was roughly constant for each thread, then I could let all the threads enter the application logic at roughly the same time. I was unable to find an good example of a BeanShell Timer using both arguments and environment variables, so I decided to document mine. The number of threads and the startup ramp duration were established as User Defined Variables, allowing them to control the Thread Group and to be accessed by my BeanShell Timer via a vars.get(parameter-name). The thread loop counter was passed into the Timer as an argument, accessed via bsh.args[].

Getting the proper delay was easy once I determined how to access the number of threads, ramp duration and thread loop counter. Take the JMeter BeanShell Timer Test Script for a test ride.

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count = Integer.parseInt(vars.get("ThreadCount"));
ramp = Float.parseFloat(vars.get("RampPeriod"));

num = Integer.parseInt(bsh.args[0]);
Integer sleep = 500 + 1000 * (count - num) * ramp / count;

log.info( "Sleep for " + sleep.toString() + " milli-seconds" );
return sleep;

If you’re following the World Cup, then you need to follow ZonalMarking. I look forward to the match analysis after each game. The tactical analysis may appear a bit deep, but it is quite approachable.

I just noticed that LinkedIn allows you to tie your twitter status and your LinkedIn status together. And I gave it about 15 seconds thought before concluding that I wasn’t going to take that step.

Here’s where I draw the lines for social media:

Blog Take the First Step

My public face, what should be the first search result on my name. Sometimes professional, sometimes personal, always me.

Twitter ideoplex

More personal than my blog, it’s the private me out and about in public. As private as hiding in the crowd allows.

LinkedIn

Pure professional (albeit a bit neglected right now).

Facebook

Primarily personal.

Foursquare

As personal as is practical.

All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, …

I am not a sailor. But I have always found the time to follow the America’s Cup Defense. It was a lot more difficult this time. No trials to select a challenger. No coverage on ESPN. I ended up following the Cup via the New York Times.

And now I’m watching a rerun of the deciding race via the 33rd America’s Cup web site.

The good thing about this game is that I don’t have strong ties to either team, so I can just enjoy the game.

The bad thing is that I’m torn about who to root for. On the one hand, I think that Peyton is the best QB in the game and I’d like for him to get his second ring so that we can just put that argument to rest. And on the other hand, I’d like to see the Saints bring the Vince Lombardi trophy back to New Orleans.

This is a tough game to pick. The Colts are favored to win, but my brain trust feels that it will be close. I’d feel much better about the Saints if they had been here before. But I have a feeling that the Saints will suffer from the first time blues. So I’m going to break with the brain trust and pick the Colts to win by 10.

It’s the final day of the season. I need a flow chart to track the Bronco’s playoff hopes. The critical Bengals-Jets game doesn’t kick off until 8:30pm. And I wish that the NFL would pay a little more attention to the rest of the sports world.

Relegation

Promotion and Relegation relegates the worst teams in a division down to a lower division and promotes the best teams in that lower division up. Unfortunately, the US doesn’t have the minor leagues to make it work.

Simultaneous Games

In the 1982 World Cup, staggered starting times for the final day of group play meant that Germany and Austria started their match knowing a German victory by two goals or less would send both teams through. It wasn’t much of a surprise when the Germans went up 1-0 after 10 minutes and nothing much happened in the remaining 80 minutes of play. As a result, the final games in group play are now played simultaneously.

I’m sure that it would cost a pretty penny for the NFL to give up the final Sunday night game of the season. But wouldn’t it be something if all the AFC games were played at the same time? Everyone would need to assume the worst and no one would be allowed to knowingly back into the playoffs.

It was a minor vanity on my part, but I retained the Radio Userland web bug as part of my Textpattern web site. My original goal was to reach 1 million page views.

That wasn’t enough and I kept going in an attempt to break into the top 20. I think that I would have made it, but the Userland Site Report has not updated since Dec 2, 2009.

It’s time to move on. I’ve removed the web bug. And with it, my last remaining link to Radio Userland.

If you are reading this, then you are probably pretty smart. You are accustomed to being right. And you have a certain amount of self-assuredness about it. Like me.

Much of that came from being a big fish in a small pond. Things change when you frequent bigger ponds. Requiring a different reaction to other self-assured people with contrary positions.

Sometimes it just doesn’t matter. Like the misguided colleague who didn’t know that Dr. Dunkenstein was Darrell Griffith.

Sometimes it is someone you are not likely to ever see again. Just let it go.

But sometimes, they are making decisions that affect you. You need to consider the possibility that they are right. Back off and double check your position. You will usually be right. Sometimes you will be wrong. Try to acknowledge when you are wrong.

Self-assured is taking a stand. Pig-headed is refusing to consider the alternatives.

PS. Every time you say “Everybody knows”, you take a step to pig-headedness.

PPS. Still working on acknowledging when I’m w***g.